White Box Appearing Around Images on Slide

Oct 22, 2013

We are re-publishing AP '09 movies to AP '13. During our testing we keep encountering the white box or white boxes being added around images. These are not visible in the PPT slide show view. Only when the presentation is published.

The upper left image - EMS Star of Life - is part of the Master Slide. The white box is encountered on every slide. 

The lower left image - warning exclamation point - is a graphic animated to appear on the slide, timed with the narration. 

Publish is with Articulate Studio '13 trial and PPT 2010. We have encountered this issue in .PPT and .PPTX files. 

13 Replies
Greg Friese

Hi, 

We received the support engineer reply that the solution for this problem is to:

"As for the white boxes around transparent images, I was able to workaround

it as follows: Right-click the current image and save it again as an image
(Save as Picture) . Replace the current image with the new one. Save
presentation then republish."

This is an unacceptable workaround. We are republishing hundreds of courses with 1000s of images that would need to be each clicked, saved as and inserted again. 

We are looking for a solution that scales to the level of content we hope to republish with Articulate '13. 

Please advise.

Thanks.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Russ,

I haven't heard back from Greg yet to look into his case, but was your republish after following the steps that Greg shared from his case to: 

"As for the white boxes around transparent images, I was able to workaround

it as follows: Right-click the current image and save it again as an image
(Save as Picture) . Replace the current image with the new one. Save
presentation then republish."

Russell Still

Ok, I think I've figured out what causes the white boxes to appear. A new "feature" since '09 it seems.

I had some older presentations with graphics where I used PowerPoint to clear out the background using Picture Tools>Format>Color>Set Transparent Color. These have the white outline. I replaced them with .pngs where I removed the background in Photoshop and the white outlines are now gone.

Unfortunately, there is no quick way to get rid of the outlines on existing graphics. Replacing them is the only solution that I'm aware of.

I think this same problem may occur if you use Insert>Clipart in PowerPoint. Testing that now.

- - - - - - - - - - - Update - - - - - - - - - - -

Turns out that the Set Transparent Color is only part of the problem. Converting such an image to a .png with the background removed in Photoshop fixed it in one presentation, but when that same image was used in a different presentation, the white outlines are back.

Ugh... I'm not having fun.

- - - - - - - - - - - Another Update - - - - - - - - - -

Making progress now. The presentations that have the white outlines come from old versions of PP. I had just been saving as the default (97-2003 Presentation). No problem in Flash, but apparently it does affect iPad output. I resaved as "PowerPoint Presentation" in PP 2010 and republished. 90% of the objects that had the outlines were now fixed. Oddly, a couple of graphics still have the outline, but I'll work on that.

So, if you're having these outline problems in your HTML5 output, make sure you are saving using current PowerPoint options. If you're using an older (I don't know how old) you may need to upgrade to PP2010. A heck of a lot easier than saving and replacing countless images.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Russ,

Thanks for sharing that additional information here. I still don't see Greg's case and haven't heard back from him so I can't add this information to his case. If you'd like to share one of your Presenter courses (create a Presenter package following these directions) that is experiencing the problem with our Support team and provide this information as well, they can try to do some further testing based on the PPT version. 

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